Hi All,It's been a long time since I am thinking of starting my own Blog. Just getting to it now finally. I know there are a large number of blogs on the Lotus Notes/Domino and the Lotus Collaboration Suite of products. Why would I want to get another one that talks about the same. Well, I am going to try and see if I can add a different flavor to it.

Along with giving out periodic information about the Lotus portfolio, concentrating on the Notes/Domino product line, I would like to see if I can give it a growth market flavor, with India as a backdrop. I have been working in IBM India for the past 6 years, and working with Indian Customers have given me some insights into what their expectations are and how they differ from the customers in the developed countries like the US and Europe. I hope to shed some light and tailor my blog to the customers & users in the growth market regions like India, China. Hope I succeed in this. As I continue to blog, I would love to get feedback from all of you, so feel free to comment and let me know how I am doing with my goal. Quick Summary of my professional career:

Spent most of my professional career in 2 companies (well maybe more, if you count subsidiaries)

Joined Iris Associates - original developers of Lotus Notes (which was then a subsidiary of Lotus) in April 1995, May 1995 - IBM buys out LotusJan 2003 - Moved to IBM India to work at IBM Software Lab, IndiaAug 2006 - Promoted to STSM (Senior Technical Staff Member)

Areas of Expertise:

Lotus Notes Client Development since release 4.6 (currently working on 8.5.3+)Integration of Notes Client in Expeditor/Eclipse frameworkMajor UI enhancements in the Notes Client

Notes, as we know it, is a platform rather than a specific application. That, in itself, adds to the complexity to the Notes Client. When I ask people what Notes Client is, they say it's Mail, Calendar, and bunch of other Databases. But really if you combine it all, it's a platform, on which applications like Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Discussion Database are built. I will try to elaborate more in my blog in the coming Months. And show the power of this which can be exploited by everyone. I would like to start off my blog showing a simple and very useful add-on to the Notes Client.

Every Indian is excited and proud to have a symbol for the Indian Currency, which is "Rupee". Until now, there was no symbol, and most people used to write "Rs" before the amount. Well, thanks to the government and IIT professor, we now have a new symbol which people can use when referring to Rupees. This is

Now, until we have a FONT which includes this character and the keystrokes assigned to it, and then getting those fonts downloaded on each windows machine, we are stuck with trying to find ways on how we can add this to our documents. Given Notes's programming model and ease of adding a new extension, I just created a simple "add-in:, which once installed into your Notes Client, will allow you to add the Rupee Symbol within any Document. Here are the steps to do this:

Copy the ZIP file from here -> Add Rupee Notes Add-in , and UNZIP the contents into your Notes Install Directory (if you don't know what this is, right-click on your Notes Client launch icon on your desktop, and select "Properties" which will tell you where the program is coming from. )

Edit your "notes.ini" file (this is also typically in your Notes Install Directory). You can use "Notepad" to edit it.

Search for "addinmenus" in this file.

If the line exists, add ",addrupee.dll" to the end of this line

If the line does NOT exist, add "addinmenus=addrupee.dll" line at the end of "notes.ini" file and hit ENTER

That's it. Once this is done, exit out of Notes and re-enter. Now in any document in a rich-text field (like the Body of your memo you are creating), click on "Action" menu and you will have a new menu option called "Add Rupee Symbol".